FOR THE DEMOCRATS, IT COULD BE TIME TO PARTY LIKE IT
IS 1982

Delaware voters are not just trending Democratic.
They are stampeding.

The Democrats have picked up more than 16,000 new
voters since the last election in 2006. The Republicans have
stayed static, adding a negligible 180 names to their
rolls.

The dynamics have left only five of the state's 41
state representative districts with more Republican than
Democratic voters. Five! Two districts flipped in the
last year alone.

For the Republicans here, "GOP" no longer
seems to stand for
Grand Old Party, but Gone to the Other Party. For the
Democrats, it raises their hopes that where the voters
go, the state House of Representatives will follow.

The House is the Republicans' last fortress in
Legislative Hall, their lone base in Dover against a
Democratic governor, lieutenant governor and state
Senate, but their 22-19 majority clearly is in jeopardy
on Election Day.

The shrinking pool of Republican districts was
evident in the new registration figures posted April 1,
the day after the deadline for Delawareans to change
their party affiliation in advance of the primary
election in September. New registrants can continue to
sign up, but there will be no more party switching by
existing voters before then.

Delaware has 574,001 registered voters -- 45 percent
Democratic, 31 percent Republican and 24 percent others.
The Democrats are up a percentage point and the
Republicans are down one since the 2006 election, when
the state had 557,736 registered voters.

It is only April. It still could get worse for the
Republicans.

Any number of factors could be driving the voters the
Democrats' way. The war? The price of gas? Home
foreclosures? Dissatisfaction with the president?
Clinton-Obama? Carney-Markell? New residents importing
their political preferences from elsewhere?

"All of the above," quipped state Rep. Bob Gilligan,
the Democratic minority leader, who would be in line to
become the speaker if his party takes the House.
"Hopefully this will be a good November."

Gilligan is the longest-suffering House Democrat, the
only one there now ever to serve in the majority. He was
elected in 1972 to the minority but saw his party roar
into control with the Watergate Class of 1974. The
Democrats went back into the minority in 1979, when one
of their members died and the Republicans won a special
election. Except for another brief fling with the
majority in the 1982-1984 term, the Democrats have been
out of power since.

A dozen dismal Election Nights have gone by for the
House Democrats since 1982 without a victory party. They
could be due.

The Delaware Republicans, like their counterparts in
other mid-Atlantic states, have been faltering. From New
York to Maryland, the Republicans have been shut out of
the governorships and retain only one U.S. Senate seat
in Pennsylvania.

The voting trends clearly are against the Delaware
Republicans, but it is not helping their situation to
have the voters fixated on the Democratic gubernatorial
rivalry between Lt. Gov. John Carney and Treasurer Jack
Markell while the Republicans have found nobody
comparable to run.

It appears to have sparked a significant amount of
party switching in the stretch of time between the
presidential primary here on Feb. 5 and the deadline for
changing on March 31. The final numbers are not
available yet, but at the mid-point, there were roughly
4,000 voters who re-registered, 3,000 of them switching
to the Democrats.

"The numbers are going up, and they are trending
Democratic, heavily Democratic. I think it's driven by
the primaries. I expect some people will turn back, but
some will stay," said Elaine Manlove, the elections
commissioner.

The only Republican House districts remaining are the
one in Brandywine Hundred, although it is held by
Democrat Bryon Short, who won it in a special election
last year, and the ones held by Republicans Deborah
Hudson in Greenville, Nick Manolakos in Hockessin, Joe
Miro in Pike Creek Valley, and Gerald Hocker in Sussex
County.

The Brandywine Hundred district represented by
Republican Greg Lavelle flipped Democratic in the last
year, while the Sussex County district of Republican Joe
Booth fell into a virtual tie with four more Democrats
than Republicans on the voter rolls.

Sussex County, though, is a special case, where party
affiliation is a distinction without a difference. Any
legislator elected there is a conservative.

The statewide registration being what it is, the
Republicans know what they are up against. As of now,
there could be perhaps a dozen districts that are
seriously contested, with the Republicans on offense in
only three of them -- against Short in Brandywine
Hundred, first-term Democrat Bobby Walls in Kent County
and a likely opening for Rep. Bethany Hall-Long's seat
in Middletown if she runs for the Senate as expected.

"It tells me that we will have a tough battle. We've
got a whale of an effort going on. We could end up after
a hard fight with 21 or 22. The big question is, who
retires, and we are not going to know that, probably
until the sessions ends July 1," said Terry Strine, the
Republican state chair.

Strine cannot be faulted for his optimism, but it
does not look good.

"I think the House will go Democratic. The
registration is astounding. It's partially driven by the
gubernatorial primary, but also because people are
upset, and some Republicans may go down because of
that," said Jim Soles, a political science professor
retired from the University of Delaware in Newark.

Soles himself is a Democrat, but it hardly matters in
this instance. Not only is he respected as a neutral
observer by profession, he has personal experience of
the other side. Four years ago he watched Paul Pomeroy,
his Republican son-in-law whom he enthusiastically
supported, lose a hard-fought race in Newark for an open
seat that had been held for years by a House Republican.

Pomeroy got the message. Shortly afterwards, he won a
place for himself on the Newark City Council. That
election was nonpartisan. It was an escape clause that
does not exist for the House Republicans in Legislative
Hall.